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Take Back the Trash

THE fight goes something like this: My wife and I are rummaging through the refrigerator after dinner, looking for space for the leftovers, when suddenly she goes on a jag against all the food that has overstayed its welcome. She starts madly purging, like one of those old Soviet dictators cleansing the politburo after a coup. She’ll pick up a container of cheese, hummus, chutney or vinaigrette, glance at the date stamped on the package, and if the date is coming up in, say, the next few days, she’ll summarily toss it into the trash.

If it’s one of her foods (kale, baba ghanouj) or the children’s (string cheese), she’ll discard it anyway. If it’s one of mine (chicken salad, pickled okra), she’ll quarantine it in a highly visible corner so that when I open the fridge the next day, I’ll find my blackballed product in its own private ghetto, silently calling out, “You’ll be having me for lunch today.”

How did we, and countless other couples I know, come to this state of marital brinkmanship? For millennia human beings have been able to determine for themselves whether or not their food has spoiled. Only in recent decades have we ceded control of our refrigerators and pantries to nameless bureaucrats and faceless corporate automatons who are surely motivated as much by fear of lawsuits or selling us more stuff as they are by whether my dinner tastes good. The moment has come to restore the sniff test to its rightful place in the American household. It’s time to take back the trash.

Not so fast, my wife demurs. Haven’t I turned on morning television or glanced at the Internet lately? Food-borne illnesses are sweeping the country. Overcrowded packaging plants and under-regulated imports are filling our kitchen with invisible spores and sleeper pathogens poised to turn our children into Patient 1 of the next global pandemic. And besides, she adds, stop being so cheap. She’s tired of scraping the bottom of the strawberry jelly jar.

She’s not alone, of course. The National Institutes of Health reported in 2009 that American food waste has increased 50 percent since 1974 and now totals 1,400 calories per day per person. Some estimates place the total amount of food thrown away in the United States every day as high as 40 percent of all the food the country produces. Perhaps because of these trends, popular culture positively brims with famous germophobes, from Bert on “Sesame Street” to Monica on “Friends” to Donald Trump on, well, everything.

Jerry Seinfeld performed a routine in recent years lamenting the problem of accidentally buying too much milk and racing to gulp down punch bowls of cereal and recruiting cats from the neighborhood to help empty the carton before the “definite, exact day” it expires. “Ever have milk the day after the day?” he asks. “It scares the heck out of you. The spoon is trembling as it comes out of the bowl. ‘It’s after the day! I’m taking a big chance! I smelled it. You smelled it. What’s it supposed to smell like?’ ”

He needn’t have worried. “Nearly two-thirds of Americans needlessly discard a quarter-gallon of milk each month,” said Ethel Tiersky, the editor of ShelfLifeAdvice.com. “Most people think those dates are telling you that after that, the food isn’t safe,” said Ms. Tiersky, a retired English teacher and self-described “food safety fanatic” who monitors the industry with the help of a blue-ribbon panel of professors. “They’re not. They’re about quality. ‘Past this point, the quality of the food is not at its best.’ ”

Virtually nothing in your refrigerator jeopardizes your health, Ms. Tiersky added. “The pathogens that cause food to look bad, smell bad or taste bad are not the ones that make you sick,” she said.

The real story is even shadier, I’m afraid. Much of the confusion on this issue comes from the tangle of terms applied to food (“sell by,” “use by,” best before”) and their dubious origins. With the exception of baby formula, the federal government (Agriculture Department, Food and Drug Administration, etc.) plays no role in regulating such terms or dates. At least 20 states administer regulations locally, but mostly for dairy products and usually to control how long products can be kept in stores, not how long they should be kept in your refrigerator.

The vast bulk of the dates that appear on the margins of dried, canned or packaged products were put there by manufacturers, who alone determine their decision-making process without revealing their standards. In other words, whom do you want to trust to tell you how long your food is good for? General Mills or general sense? Chef Boyardee or Chef Mom and Dad?

“We have five senses that were given to us that are the best tools for finding out whether food has gone bad,” said Bridget Lancaster, a host of “America’s Test Kitchen” on PBS. “We’ve all opened a carton of milk that has three days to go and it smells bad. Conversely, we’ve all opened one where the date’s three days past and it’s still fine. My dad used to say that a weatherman has only a 50-50 chance of getting the weather right. I feel the same way with food.”

Ms. Lancaster said that to avoid squabbling with her husband, a professional chef who’s a stickler for expiration dates, she uses a “first in, first out” philosophy that many stores employ. When all else fails, she falls back on her personal motto of cooking: somebody will eat it.

“Food is to be eaten and enjoyed,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be a slave for your cooking. You’re not supposed to be stressing over what’s for dinner. There’s probably stuff in your fridge, at any moment, that you can whip into a meal. And better to use it than throw it out. It breaks my heart to throw out food.”

I was concerned that my exploration had not exactly turned up anyone defending my wife’s position, which, if nothing else, wasn’t politic. That is, until I happened on a most unexpected source: the Seventh Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals.

In 2003, an Illinois company bought 1.6 million bottles of Henri’s salad dressing labeled with a “best when purchased by” date that had passed. The company then arbitrarily changed the date to a year later and resold the bottles to discount stores. The leaders of the company were eventually convicted of fraud.

But when the case came up for appeal in 2009, Judge Richard Posner, writing for the majority, personally attacked the prosecutor for not proving that the product was dangerous. A member of his team even found some expired salad dressing in her pantry, tasted it and found it fine. Salad dressing is “shelf stable,” he wrote. “It has no expiration date.”

Indignant that the government had not checked whether the product was endangering anyone’s safety, Judge Posner wrote a blistering judgment: “There is no suggestion that selling salad dressing after the ‘best when purchased by’ date endangers human health,” he said. “There is no evidence that any buyer of any of the 1.6 million bottles sold by the defendant has ever complained about the taste.”

On first glance, Judge Posner, who is known for his fiery opinions, seemed to be on my side, but I decided to telephone him to see if he had any advice for resolving my marital standoff. After first saying he wasn’t involved in the food purchasing decisions in his household, he told me he once faced a similar situation with his wife of 48 years, Charlene. As a young lawyer, he handled an antitrust case involving Clorox bleach in which he learned that all household bleach has the same formula. So he asked his wife, “Why buy Clorox when the store label brands are cheaper?”

Her reply: the savings are trivial, and Clorox is a brand, so it is more invested in its reputation. “Those were good arguments,” he said. “It would be perfectly sensible for your wife to say she doesn’t want to do a study of the precise meaning of these various terms, because the easy thing is just to accept the expiration dates.”

So my smell test, in other words, is unnecessary? “Exactly,” he said. “Plus, you always surrender in an argument with your wife, right? Isn’t that the formula for marital happiness?”

Therein lies the truth of a well-kept kitchen: the health of your food is far less important than the health of your marriage.

Bruce Feiler is the author, most recently, of “The Council of Dads: A Story of Family, Friendship & Learning How to Live.”